


Time Turned Fragile

by Mellaithwen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Angst, Djinnverse (Supernatural), Episode Related, Episode: s02e20 What Is and What Should Never Be, F/M, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-09
Updated: 2007-08-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 03:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1289221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mellaithwen/pseuds/Mellaithwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU 2X20 What Is And What Should Never Be:  Dean stays and it won’t stop raining...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Turned Fragile

 

*-*-*

  
_“...my love for you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any other motive. In the midst of my egoism, I yet could not bear to come like a death-shadow across the feast of your joy. I could not bear to forsake the world in which you still lived and might need me; it was part of the faith I had vowed to you, - to wait and endure.” -- ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George_   _Eliot._

*-*-*

The blade stills inches above his heart.

“Dean...” Carmen whispers as his mother’s fingers brush through his hair and Jessica smiles in Sam’s embrace.

The knife falls with a deafening clatter and his mother’s touch vanishes in a blink. Jessica and Carmen are gone and only Sam remains in an empty abandoned warehouse; now devoid of hanging bodies. No whimpering girl, no Djinn. All gone with a faint command of  _shh, sleep, get some rest._

Sam stands with an outstretched palm and arms wide open. Dean can’t remember ever seeing him ever look so inviting, so  _Sammy_ , since he woke up in this world.

It won’t last. But Dean stays, and tells himself it’s for Sam’s benefit and not his own.

He isn’t fooling anyone.

*-*-*

He stays and it won’t stop raining, at least, for the most part.

It rarely  _storms_. There’s no thunder, no lightning, just rain. Rain that doesn’t stop, blue skies of yesterday brushed over with melancholy. Too much water in the paint. Grey shades overwhelm the canvas. Smudged perfection.  _Start again._

He spends his days at the window and he never goes after the Djinn again.

Sometimes he’s joined there, at the window. And sometime he isn’t. Sometimes he sits, sometimes he stands and even if it’s dark, he can still see it beneath the street-lamp outside on the corner; the white streaks of pelting water.

If he squints he sees reflections in the tumbling liquid. Reflections that aren’t there. It puts him on edge to think where they’re really from. Where he belongs.

Droplets patter against the window pane but the rain stopped  _hammering_  a few days ago and it doesn’t hail anymore, not since Dean started feeling light-headed in the late afternoon.

Not since he had to lie down every now again like a baby needing a nap.

“You can tell me if you’re coming down with something, you know.” Carmen smiles as Dean ducks from her palm aimed at his forehead. “I  _am_  a nurse.”

“I’m fine.”

“You fell asleep before 7pm, Dean, how is that fine?”

“I was a little tired—”

“You’re _never_  tired.” She smiles wryly, the only thing missing being a suggestive wink that he doesn’t need to see to know exactly what she means.

But since then it’s just gotten worse.

The exhaustion, that is.

*-*-*

_Dank and cold. Bodies hang by their aching bleeding wrists. Feet scramble for purchase weakly as the blood is drained from you dry. An aching in your neck and everything’s fuzzy and numb. The edges blurred, vision distorted and then a man._

_“S...Sa...Sam.” You mutter, whisper, stutter._

_The man—who isn’t really a man at all— tattoo-ed face and blue eyes, touches your face, shushes you like a wailing babe, and says; “Go back.”_

Dean shoots awake so quickly that the bed dips drastically and Carmen’s arms are around his chest before he can even blink.

“Easy there tiger,” She coos in concern. “Bad dream?”

“Do I get them a lot?” Dean asks, adding a slight of sarcasm to turn his question—veiled, and hidden from a man who doesn’t remember—into a jibe she won’t ask about.

“You do lately.” She answers anyway. She always does. “Go back to sleep. Get some rest.”

*-*-*

He’s tired because he doesn’t sleep.

He’s tired because he dropped the knife. He’s tired because he stayed and brought on the nightmares, the guilt, because he knows; deep down, that this is all so wrong.

At first he would just wake up in a cold sweat, take a second to catch his breath and go on with his morning routine.

But when the dreams got worse, his routine changed too.

Instead of falling back asleep and grudgingly being woken up hours later by his girlfriend, he’s forced to stay awake. Lingering by the window a little too long and watching clouds in the distance, waiting for rain.

He never used to, but now whenever he wakes inadvertently from a nightmare, he always remembers them. It’s taking the phrase  _haunted by your past_  to a whole new level.

*-*-*

The rickety pier is calm and soothing; the sea-air rushing through your lungs with the distinct taste of salt on your tongue. You step closer to the edge, you kneel, you stare at the glistening water, lapping around, and tiny bubbles pop at the surface from air pockets down below.

Something catches your eye, a reflection of the sun, or something under the small waves, perhaps? A plant, or a fish...you don’t know. You reach out to touch it, to grab it.

But it grabs you first.

Mossy, green, slimy and old. Decaying, but with the shape of condemned youth.

An arm, a vice like grip that holds your wrist so tightly that you think it might break. Like seaweed caught fast on your captive limb, the spirit has you and won’t let go. Dragged to the depths of a Sheriff’s guilt and a young boy’s watery grave all you can do is thrash and pull and hope someone saves you. Soon.

Your lungs scream for mercy and without a thought you open your mouth to shout for someone, anyone. Water rushes in, burning the back of your throat, your eyes, your nose, and your ears. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink, but just enough all around, to take you to the brink.

A single bubble appears on the lapping surface...

... _pops_...

...And is forgotten.

*-*-*

Dean wakes up clawing at his throat. Air suddenly readily available is sucked in too quickly and comes shooting back out in gasps,  _cough, splutter_  and Carmen’s awake, her arms keeping him from bowling over and toppling off the bed. She holds him, she helps him.

He breathes.

But Lucas doesn’t.

_Tragedy has struck the people of Wisconsin again this week as young Lucas Barr drowned in the lake outside of his home at Lake Manitoc on Thursday evening. The most recent in a long list of misfortunes regarding the area, Lucas’ father Christopher Barr also died this year in the lake; however authorities believe both events are unrelated to..._

Dean swallows the lump in his throat as he remembers the fear that he might have been too late. The freezing water smacking him as he breached the surface and dived straight in. The prolonged moments, the seconds that ticked by as he and Sam searched the murky depths for the little boy.

But then he remembers being on that pier, wet and shivering, reviving the quiet child and watching the water spill from his mouth as his eyes blinked open; dazed but alive. He remembers relief; he remembers a kiss on his cheek and the blush that came after. He remembers  _Zeppelin’ Rules_  and Sam’s teasing in the car.

He closes the webpage as Carmen sneaks up behind him. Her lips brush across his tense jaw. Her fingers dance playfully across his body and he gets goose bumps as firm as his...

“Oh god.”

*-*-*

He sees articles on bodies found in the woods of Colorado but nothing more, and he can’t know for sure that...

_Oh come on, Dean, who are you trying to kid here?_

He knows that whatever remains the Wendigo left behind belong to Hayley and her brothers. And he knows it’s his fault.

*-*-*

Every now and again Dean wanders to the garage. Sam told him exactly where to go and even kept his concerned questions to himself. Dean wanted it that way. Dean got it that way.

His boss is the ageing, laid back mechanic he met in Lawrence some years ago. He’d been with Sam then, posing as officers of the law to gather information on their—at the time—missing father.

Now, here, it’s Mike, a man who Dean has known his entire life. Mike and his wife were there to help when John passed away. Good neighbours, old pals. A family friend. Owned the shop with his daddy. And Dean took over from the old man when John retired.

Dean tries not to laugh when he hears that his father  _retired_  from something. He hides it as he wipes the sweat from his brow and continues to work on his customer’s engine. He can’t remember the last time he worked on a car that wasn’t his own. Not counting the crap-ass hunks of metal at Bobby’s yard that are barely passable as motor-vehicles.

And honestly, the only effort he put in then was kicking the things into action long enough to get them where they needed to be.

“How’s it going there, Dean?” Mike asks kindly.

Dean smiles. People are kind to him in this world. They know him and they’re not suspicious. Well, Sam is, sometimes. But for the most part things are going well. Maybe that’s what’s freaking Dean out. That the Djinn must be working into overtime to iron out the kinks that made Dean resist the urge to stay in the first place.

*-*-*

While he sleeps and dreams, a familiar face is leaning over him, half angry, half sad.

“Andrea,” he breathes deeply, recognition in his voice. He swallows his initial scream and favours a whispered name instead. Her face changes, softens into another, Jenny. Meg. Charlie.

The body keeps morphing and changing. Shortening into a little boy and then a little girl, a kid with a baseball bat and then another, before returning to full size and representing more and more saved lives now lost.

Finally, Dean is looking up at his father; the father who raised him and taught him how to hunt. Not the one who retired and coached a softball team. Not the one whose grave sits among patriots like himself. But the one whose body was set alight on a pyre with only his sons as witnesses.

Dean can tell. There’s a haunted look behind brown eyes that Dean’s all too familiar with. This man lost his wife. His world fell apart as soon as he walked out of Missouri Mosely’s home with the spark of vengeance now fully aflame.

This is Dean’s father, shaking his head as though without comprehension.

Dean never excuses what he’s done and John never voices his judgement. It’s as though he’s lost in time, and all he can do is shake his head as a repetitive hologram and nothing more.

It happens every night and the longer it goes on, the further John gets to the corner until he’s shrouded in shadow and the only way Dean knows is father is even in the room is because he can feel the disappointment. Like a knife. Like  _the_  knife.

Dean stays and every morning he wakes up in a cold sweat. He stays and feels the guilt gnaw at his insides as he shifts in bed at night, uneasy and afraid.

He stays and every morning that he regrets it, Carmen’s there, lying next to him.

Every time he freezes in conversation Sam covers for him. Sam talks to him now, not as much as before...as his own Sammy, but it’s something, something more than nothing.

“Be content.” His mother whispers whenever she’s around.

“Get some rest.” Everyone else advises as they brush past him and wander off.

Dean wonders if they still exist when he can’t see them, if he was right about the supernatural acid trip, that is. Like that proverb about trees and noise...or trying to figure out if the light in the fridge is always on even whenever the door is closed.

That’s what his perfect world has come down to.

*-*-*

A clown isn’t just something little Sammy’s afraid of. It’s killing, maiming parents and leaving children orphaned and alone, and more importantly; blaming themselves.

Dean opens his eyes to a grinning face that would scare the shit out of Pennywisehimself. With a knife held aloft, the clown  _giggles_  and that same knife comes crashing down into Dean’s throat. There’s an eerie xylophone playing in the back of his nightmare while blood gushes out almost in rhythm with the melodic tune.

He wakes up a second time, scrambling to a sitting position and stealing the covers from Carmen in doing so.

“I thought your brother was the one who was afraid of clowns.” Carmen frowns when she’s filled in on this latest nightmare of Dean’s.

“I think it’s safe to say I can understand that now.” Dean mutters, rubbing his shaking hand across his jugular. Intact. Just the way he likes it.

*-*-*

He stops switching on the lights when they keep flickering. When bulbs blow if he thinks too much about...the world he left behind. The world he swore to defend, the world he turned his back on and ran from. The world with Sammy, not the world with Sam.

Besides, it’s easier to see the rain if the lights are off.

There aren’t so many shadows either.

And that’s a plus, Dean thinks.

He just tries to keep his eyes open and know to close them when disjointed faces scream at him as phantoms in his mind. With their mouths agape with skin grey and weeping. The monsters that shoot out from dark corners and those tiny spaces behind doors and mirrors. The ghosts that wait beneath the window sill outside and sit perched behind the drawn curtains at night...

They’re waiting.

*-*-*

Drunk, Dean slurs that his memory isn’t what is used to be.

Carmen laughs with him and thinks it’s a joke. She plays along when he asks her how they met, and she tells the story in the third person; as though it’s part of an elaborate romantic novel, and not their lives.

He should have worked it out, really; Carmen being a nurse and Dean being as prone to accidents in this world as he is in his own.

Only here they’re sporting injuries, normal accidents that leave him hospitalized with a pretty nurse to flirt with. Not hunting. No electrocution, no wounds that can’t be explained away. It’s all so painfully  _right_  and normal.

And perfect.

*-*-*

For every piece on faith healing in local Nebraskan newspapers, Dean finds an obituary that makes no sense. Sudden onsets of terminal diseases, the healthy dying of hurts they never felt before their last moments on earth.

It doesn’t hit Dean as hard as the others. He already blamed himself for that hunt gone askew. There’s no change now that the Reverend’s still healing.

Just more names to add to the list in his head of all that he couldn’t do and everyone he failed to save.

*-*-*

His mother was right, the longer he stays the harder it is to distinguish between the days. When it doesn’t stop raining, he wrings his fingers, balls his fists and paces whenever he’s not working under the hood of a neighbour’s car...

And then sometimes it’s warm and perfect and Dean can’t believe the difference in such a short space of time.

When the sun shines, Dean wonders if he’s dead. But then it rains again come morning (or is it afternoon?) and he can nearly feel the tug on his wrists.

The rope burn bruising his skin is starting to fade.

In another world, he’s slumped and comatose being bled for food and the Djinn is having a freaking field day; because Dean’s not fighting anymore.

*-*-*

Sam agrees to look through an old photo album with Dean. It’s one of the most awkward things Dean has ever done...at the beginning. Around 4 pages in, Sam warms up to his brother and Dean’s grateful for it.

“When was this taken...again?” Dean asks, picking up the photograph from out of the album in Sam’s lap. John smiles with his sons and Sam and Dean are clad in protective helmets and elbow pads. Faces with smiles he doesn’t recognise.

“Uh, Dad took us skateboarding—”

“Skateboarding...”

“Yeah, he sat on the grass. It was before you wrecked your knee the first time around, so must have been 1993?”

Dean remembers wrecking his knee when he was 14 years old. He doesn’t remember skateboarding with his father’s watchful eye but he remembers being thrown into a tree by an angry spirit in the woods. Thrown far from the clearing where his father stood and smacking into the bark—falling hard onto his knee and left lying there.

He remembers the agony waiting for John to finish cleaning the place out before he could even come looking for Dean.

He remembers biting his lip hard enough to make it bleed and he remembers his father’s concern masked with anger, telling him he should have stayed back like he was told.

“How  _did_  I wreck my knee...uh, again?”

“Baseball game, remember? You landed badly trying to score a homerun.”

“But I scored the homerun, right?” Dean grins.

“Yeah you did.” Sam smiles in what he assumes to be joint remembrance. “Dad freaked, tried to get you off the team, threatened to sue the school for negligence, it was kinda funny to see him all riled up like that.” Sam mistakes Dean’s surprise as offence. “Not that you wrecking your knee was funny or anything. Completely  _not_  funny—”

                                                                                                                    

“Easy, little brother, you’ll pull something.”

Sam flips through more pages of photos while Dean smiles at the image of his father venting his worry out on a middle-aged man coaching a kid’s baseball team, rather than a ghost who caught Dean by surprise.

*-*-*

“Do I love you?” Dean asks without thinking one night and quickly tries to cover. “I mean, I do, I just...I didn’t mean it like that.” His face falls into his waiting palms and his stubble bristles past the skin of his hands.

Carmen comes closer and Dean wonders how many times she’s had to do this. How many times she’s had to see through whatever crap coming out of his mouth and realise there’s a meaning in there somewhere that everyone else might not see.

But she does.

“Well I can’t speak for you, but I know  _I_  love you, and you’ve told me before that  _you_  do.”

Her fingers dance in his hair and he can’t smell her perfume past the beer in his hand.

*-*-*

It’s nearly lunchtime. Everyone’s at work, including himself, and Dean hasn’t touched a firearm in months. He’s giving the books a once-over while Mike’s busy at work under an old camero.

Everything seems to slow down and Dean supposes yeah, he  _should_  get the upper hand in his own fantasy world. The hair’s on his arms stand on end and he feels goose bumps rise up along his skin. He turns in time to see the props keeping the car up shake. It’s nothing, barely a movement at all but Dean’s running forward and he’s shouting at Mike to get out from under there.

The man’s too slow and he’s barely half way out when one of the props gives way completely and the car tilts dangerously before falling.

But Dean’s there in a flash. He puts his whole body weight into keeping the thing up and it’s the weight of a car crushing his back for god’s sake. He holds it until Mike’s clear and then he jumps out of the way himself. The car falls and the tyre pressure blows holes in the rubber from the crash back down.

He feels a little like Superman. After he’s had the crap beaten out of him by kryptonite knuckle dusters. Dean grits his teeth at the aching and Mike stands breathless; in awe.

“Jesus, Dean, if you hadn’t been here—”

“I gotta go.” Dean announces, running away from the outstretched palm and the grateful smile. It reminds him too much of home and that’s when he realises how much this place isn’t  _home_.

He doesn’t want to be Superman and save the day he just wants to settle down with his own Lois Lane and be left alone.

Mike calls after him, worried that he might have done more damage to his back than he was letting on, but considering the speed the kid’s currently climbing running off, the old mechanic doubts it.

*-*-*

“I know all of their names.” Dean explains to the palms of his hands like they can hear him. Like it might clean away the blood that’s stuck there while he sifts through another set of obituaries in today’s paper and circles the one’s that shouldn’t be there in red marker.

He knows them all from memory. John used to say he had a damn good head on those shoulders, especially with remembering all sorts. Like his mom.

Dean can feel his father’s phantom palms on his back.

_You saved someone today, kiddo._

He can remember their weight spread through fingers and thumbs. Can remember the last time they had that. That moment where they both wanted comfort and neither needed to ask.

In his memory, they’re in the kitchen, an apartment loaned out to them by a friend. The oven’s blaring because Dean set the timer for the pre-heat. Dad’s home early, dad  _came_  home early, wanted to make dinner, wanted to be there and the only reason Dean’s got a head-start is ‘cause he was damned hungry himself. Growing boys.

John mentions how Dean’s a good boy and god knows he gets that from his mother.

He sits, and as soon as he mentions his darling wife’s name, he freezes. Stops. Opens and closes his fist like he expects something to be there, his gun, a beer, her hand. Fingers intertwined as she leads him to the dance floor of their wedding reception, of anyone’s wedding reception. Of their anniversary at the club.

The oven keeps blaring for so long that they both forget it’s there, and the only thing that reminds them is Sam thundering downstairs worried and annoyed.

Dean opens his eyes to a different dream as the front door clicks and opens. Closes seconds later and has Carmen walking up to him, curling her own hands around his broad shoulders and leaning in to kiss the crook of his neck.

“There’s my hero.”

“What?”

Dean spins around and Carmen’s forced to back up and frown.

“Your mom called in my lunch break when  _you_  wouldn’t answer.” She tells him, gesturing to the blinking red lights of messages unheard. “She told me what happened.”

“Who told  _her_?”

“Mike? Why does it matter? Dean...”

He turns away from her, faces the desk and plays the martyr that deserves no praise.

He ignores the beginning of a migraine and ignores the pen that falls from his lifeless palm. He stares at his numb fingers, confused. He tries to get his index finger to touch his thumb, but it won’t. They just twitch against the mild cramp Dean can hardly feel.

“Dean, talk to me, what’s wrong?”

“Promise me you won’t make a big deal out of all of this.”

“You saved his  _life_ —” 

“I’m asking you, please, just forget it ever happened.”

Dean can’t be expected to be a hero here too.

*-*-*

A woman with brunette waves dies above him on the ceiling. Her blood drips onto his forehead and her eyes are soft and kind and caring.

And glazed and dead. Lifeless and alone.

She catches fire and the flames shoot out at him. The blood on her white nightgown is burnt black. Yellow eyes are gleaming in the darkness as photographs on the mantel burn and curl and fall into the fiery pit that was once their bedroom’s carpet. The smog of black smoke envelopes the room and come morning he can’t stop coughing.

This is the one flash of reality he was dreading to see again.

*-*-*

The phone rings and rings and Dean’s glad he switched his cell to silent ‘cause it’s been ringing for just as long. He finally gives in and answers the damn thing and feels like cursing when he hears Sam on the other end.

“Why aren’t you answering your phone? Mom’s been calling your cell for over an hour.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Busy?”

“Yeah, busy.”

“Doing what exactly? What’s going on?”

“You called  _me_ , dude.”

“Yeah ‘cause mom said you  _saved_  Mike. If you’d done that a couple weeks ago you would have been boasting about it for weeks! You’d expect a raise, and a medal or something.”

“Things change.” Dean mutters, annoyed with his other self—the one Sam’s talking about, the one who sounds like a complete jerk even with Dean’s skewed standards. “I gotta go.”

He hangs up without a second thought.

*-*-*

The headaches start attacking him when he’s in a crowd of people and he sees too much and knows too much and suddenly he’s waking up on the floor with Sam leaning over him. Concerned.

It reminds him of home Even if nothing else does.

Dean looks around at the house he doesn’t remember, sees photographs he wishes he could understand; hold memories to...but he can’t. And this is where he lived, this is supposed to be perfect and he keeps noticing the cracks in the seams.

After crying out, fainting and then proceeding to spend 10 minutes looking around the room as though he doesn’t remember where he is—which, he doesn’t, in a manner of speaking—Dean’s family convince him to get a check up. They convince him in the same way they convinced him to stay in the first place.

They ask him if he’s been eating properly, did he hit his head?  _Is this because of the incident at the garage, if I’d known I never would have let you go back to work so—_

_Mom, I’m fine._

Carmen drives him to the hospital and everyone thinks Dean will be back soon. Only he isn’t. The doctor, concerned, just like Sam, admits Dean for more tests. Before he knows what he’s doing he’s wearing a damned hospital gown and propped up in bed—more bored than ever.

His only amusement comes from his insurance card and the details embroiled on there.

_Dean Winchester._

Who would have thought?

*-*-*

Dean panics when he finds out the family doctor is going to be treating him. He’s old, practically a walking cliché when he smiles kindly and asks how his favourite patient is doing.  _The tests show nothing_ ; he explains kindly, fondly,  _no problems_. It’s likely he’s just dehydrated.

“Eaten anything today, Dean?”

“Uh, breakfast.”

“It’s four in the afternoon.”

“It was a big breakfast.”

“You wanna tell me what’s really going on, son?”

Dean bristles without thinking.  _Son_.

But then the man’s face softens and he sits himself on the side of the bed. His eyes sparkle and Dean suddenly feels inclined to trust him with everything he knows. Well, not  _everything_.

Dean tries to see it from a medical point of view and leaves out the Djinn—which Sam has conveniently forgotten about too—and monsters, demons, ghosts and a tendency to break the law no matter what state he drives through.

He tells him what he can, and all that he doesn’t know and he supplies real memories—censored of course—of a father and brother and a fire that took everything away when he was four years old.

And a mother lost in the flames that engulfed it all.

“Dean,” the doctor says calmly, “do you remember me?”

Maybe it’s a defence mechanism. Some need to destroy something good. But, not inclined to lie as he is, Dean shakes his head and the doctor frowns considerably.

*-*-*

The X-Ray Dean’s shown from his last stay, many, many months ago, show webbed cracks in his skull that remind him of broken glass after a car crash in Missouri. The photographic plate itself of a skeleton surrounded by the dark blue blotches of reality trying to push its way back in, reminds him of too many fractures as a kid.

“Because of sport.” His family will remind him.

  
_Because of hunting,_  someone else far away tells him straight with a smell that’s so strong it’s more like a sense a being. Of gunpowder and whisky and eyes that bore into your soul within a weathered face older than forty.

Hunting.

*-*-*

He stares at the TV remote in his hand and has no inclination to switch through the numerous soap-operas on daytime television. Holed up in the hospital yet again Dean’s mind trails off to his father’s words of warning after coming back from the brink and lying there with only weeks to live with Sam at the foot of the bed.

_“Looks like you’re gonna leave town without me.”_

_“What are you talking about? I’m not gonna leave you here.”_

Dean wonders for a little while if Sam’s found him yet. But then he thinks about something else, something far worse.

He doesn’t think about the bitter after-taste that came with knowing John had never called back. He doesn’t think about the pain and the fear and Sammy’s face begging him to be okay.

He thinks about two kids— _“grab your sister’s hand”_ —stuck in a basement, dead now, from a Rawhead and its sick games

*-*-*

Dean reminds the good doctor about patient confidentiality and says as sternly as he can muster—woozy for some reason— _this stays between us, got it Doc?_

And then proceeds to refuse any more treatment. He knows what’s wrong and now he can tell his family that everything’s fine and go back to how it was.

“Dean, this could be very serious, memory loss is nothing to be—”

“You already did the tests, Doc; you said it yourself, nothing to worry about.”

The doctor backs down too easily. Dean wonders if he told them all about this, how fake it all is, if they’d disappear in a cloud of smoke and fade away and maybe...he’d wake up.

Does he want to wake up?

_Well, do you?_

“See you around, Doc.”

*-*-*

It rains in the car when Carmen drives him home.

It rains when they park outside the apartment complex and it rains when they’re running to the door.

It rains  _again_.

But at least this place has its consistencies.

*-*-*

Dean calls Pastor Jim with a number he’s known off by heart since he was twelve. He isn’t surprised when the old man answers the phone, but he’s saddened when his name rings no bells and at the white lies he’s hearing.

_There’s no such thing as hunting, boy, don’t be ridiculous._

He forgot how patronising the world was when you were among the naïve and innocent. Like Little Red Riding Hood asking grandma if the Big Bad Wolf really exists and being told No just before the damn thing eats the old lady for breakfast.

When he hangs up the phone, he thinks about leaving but then Carmen’s waiting in the doorway with a shaky smile and a pregnancy test in the palm of her hand and nothing else matters.

*-*-*

“We’re having a baby.” Dean smiles at his own reflection in the mirror. It’s an interval between their celebratory microwave-meal. Carmen’s got a late shift in an hour but Dean’s determined to stay in the moment.

He’s about to leave when his reflection, his god damn reflection replies.

“No you’re not, Dean.”

Despite having hunted the supernatural for the majority of his life, this still fazes him. He half expects Bloody Mary to be waiting to make his eyes bleed.

But they’re not bleeding behind the reflective surface. They’re fuming. And the words spoken are spilling from the glass not his lips. “No, you’re not having a baby and Carmen doesn’t exist. And even if she does, she’s not  _yours_.”

“You’re not real.” He rubs his eyes hard and blinks a couple times.

“ _I’m_  not real? I’m the only real thing in this damn place! You need to wake the hell up already and get rid of this fantasy.”

“I can’t.”  _I don’t want to._  “I can’t do that to Sam, he’s happy.”

“With Jess? Who burned on the  _ceiling_? You saw it too, Dean. She’s gone, just like your mom is gone, just like your dad.”

“Shut up.”

“Quit kidding yourself, dude. You’d think that this many deaths would make a crusader out of you, not a coward.”

“I’m not a coward!”

“Prove it.”

*-*-*

Shape shifters run riot wherever they go. Some steal, some maim, some kill, but none of them are coming after Dean Winchester in this reality.

Men in orange jumpsuits fall like flies and it’s explained away by a string of unrelated heart-attacks. But not here.

A trickster gets his revenge on the unworthy humans living around him. He has crocodiles attack the greedy and cruel and has ghostly apparitions hunt the adulterous professors at the local college. He gives them their just-desserts and no one tries to stop him.

A hotel closes for good and becomes abandoned after the last of the owners is killed by falling down the stairs. Her daughter drowned and her mother died of a heart attack upstairs. The butler walks away with a buttoned up winter coat and locks the front door for the last time.

But not here.

A village goes missing, then a town, then another and another and demons run wild throughout county’s and boroughs. Yellow eyes lead them all and somewhere in the thick of it, Sam’s all alone.

Dean’s sees cities burning now and screams that never end. Maybe this is the worst case scenario, maybe it’s his imagination forced into over-drive.

  
_Or maybe it’s your subconscious catching flashes of reality_.

Not here.

*-*-*

Dean’s figured out it takes a couple glasses of whisky before his reflection gets a smart mouth. It takes bloody knuckles and smashed glass to figure out that once he’s talking he won’t stop until Dean’s listened.

He also has to explain an elaborate excuse to Carmen when she asks what the hell happened.

She believes his story of not sleeping enough and watching too many horror flicks before getting into the shower. She makes sure his knuckles are cleaned and bound and smiles. She reprimands that he should have cleaned it out straight away and not sat stunned and staining the carpet waiting for her to get home.

Dean never tells her that he wasn’t waiting for her. He doesn’t correct her; he doesn’t say that he’s been bandaging bloody fists a lot longer than she has. He doesn’t say, because Dean Winchester doesn’t hunt.

He’s a mechanic from Kansas with a mother and a brother and until last year—a doting father. He has a girl and there’s a baby on the way. He can’t ignore that protective streak and he doesn’t plan to.

Anything else can be put on hold for now, can’t it?

He doesn’t notice Carmen watching him when he lies awake at night because he’s afraid of what’s waiting in his subconscious.

He’s too distracted to feel her fingers stroking his skin in a gesture of comfort.

*-*-*

By the window, his nose is pressed against the glass, smoky with his own breath and condensation. It’s cold on his flushed skin.

He can’t sleep and the rain outside sooths him.

Until he blinks and the rain is red and thick. Every drop makes his head spin and he pushes harder against the window and tries to make the damp freeze push away the headache. Push away the pain.

His body aches suddenly and the windows are covered in it, red...blood. It’s blood. He can smell it through the double glazing for god’s sake. Crimson rivulets cake the glass until it bubbles on the frame and bursts with a bloody splash onto the outside ledge.

A plant Carmen put there drowns in it.

It’s darker without the fading light of the rainy day. Much darker.

Dean panics.

The lights aren’t on, but Dean can practically feel the EVP in the air. Crackling and edging closer. Waves and waves of it.

He runs through the empty apartment to find that every window is the same and he dare not check the door. A little voice asks when the hell did he become such a wussy? The same one that’s been screaming since the blade fell from unable fingers. The one that’s desperately trying to wake up. The one in the mirror.

Just before the windows are covered and the dark is total and inescapable, Dean sees a glimpse, a second of something else.

_Darkness still with splashes of light. Dark walls, hanging bodies, bound wrists that chaff and bleed. Pain that glides from numb fingers until his forearms burn. Shoulders that scream as they’re half-dislocated and forced to hold weight. While his feet barely touch the floor._

_Blue eyes, a hand, a voice._

And it passes.

Dean blinks and the rain is rain. Translucent. Normal. He slumps to the floor and buries his head in his hands, because this is all getting too fucked up for his normal world to handle.

When he can move without the room spinning, he stumbles into the bathroom and stares at the new mirror; and his haggard face.

He doesn’t even need the alcohol anymore to see the smirk behind the reflected glass.

“You okay there, Dean? You look a little flustered.”

_Fucker._

*-*-*

Dean doesn’t want his second chance going to waste, even if this world  _is_ all in his head. He starts meeting up with Sam and Jess and Carmen comes with him. She squeezes his hand in the awkward silences and after a while, the awkwardness goes away.

They’re sitting in a nice little restaurant when a wave of exhaustion hits Dean like a jackhammer to the face and he falls from his chair without warning. Sam shoots up from where he sits and he instantly grabs his older brother before he makes it the floor. He props Dean up and guides him to the men’s room, all the while wearing a typical frown of worry for Dean’s wellbeing.

“What the hell, Dean?” he asks once the door’s closed and the older brother pushes off towards the sink. He grabs at cold water that trickles through his fingers and lets the droplets brush down behind his collar and down his spine cooling the fever that’s there. His face is flushed and he splashes cold water on his cheeks until his stomach stops doing flip flops and he’s not fighting the urge to topple over anymore.

“Shouldn’t have skipped lunch.” Dean says.

“Bullshit.” Sam replies because he’s heard it enough.

“Shut up, Sam.”

“You said you were fine, that the doctor said you were fine but you’re  _still.not.fine_!”

“Would you drop it already? So I feel a little off, big deal!”

“Yeah Dean, it is a big deal, okay? Does Carmen know about this?”

“Let it go Sam, it’s a cold, or a bug, it’s nothing I swear!”

Sam stops when he hears the desperation in Dean’s tone. He’s begging his brother to stop asking and as worried as he is, all Sam can do is concede.

He excuses himself from the table as soon as the both of them get back to their ladies. Coat in hand, he kisses Carmen on the cheek and gives her a smile.

“I’ll come with you—” She says already starting to stand.

“No,” he stops her, hurriedly. “No, it’s fine; I just...stay, okay? I don’t want to ruin your night. Thanks guys,” he directs to Sam and Jessica, “I had a great time.”

He leaves before he can hear Carmen and Jessica’s call of  _“Get some rest,”_  in tandem with Sam’s. The rumble of the Impala crashes through the quiet streets until he’s home, sweet, fantasy and collapsing on the sofa alone.

*-*-*

Phantom screams wake him up and the sudden jerking have him rushing to the bathroom to expel tonight’s dinner.

“Well look who it is.” Dean’s reflection mutters when he looks up from washing his mouth out with water.

“Everyone has a right to be happy, even me.” Dean gets out, jumps in, aware of how hard it is to get a word in edge ways with his apparent conscious.

“Yeah? What about Andrea and Lucas? What about Hayley and her brothers? Jenny? They’re the survivors; they’ve all lost their loved ones, friends, parents, husbands, why should they die when they’ve already suffered so much?”

Dean shakes his head.

“Emily? Lori? Seri?” His reflection pauses, dramatically almost, eyes drooping as his voice comes out in a strangled whisper; “Cassie?”

The reflection is replaced with her own form that shakes as Dean’s eyes widen. Before he can answer, before he can even think, she’s gone. A flickered form of reality with only moments to spare in between.

He takes a deep breath. He knows what he has to do.

*-*-*

He visits his father’s grave twice a week. It used to be twice a day when he just didn’t know what to do. When he didn’t leave and didn’t wake up and stayed in the fantasy world of his own creations.

_Sam could be dying, he could already be dead, what have you done?_

He remembers a sworn promise to kill anyone who went near his brother as he’s tied to a chair and a shot goes off in the distance of the red-neck’s barn. He doesn’t feel that ferocity here and maybe that isn’t such a good thing after all.

But then Jess calls him, while Sam’s in class and asks if Dean’s okay, since he left pretty early last night, and that’s not like him at all. Except lately, that is, but she keeps that to herself.

  
_Yeah_ , he says.  _I’m okay._

She pauses for the both of them. And in the words that aren’t said she asks him where he is, he tells her of his pain and they both wish they could open up on a stronger level than their commonalities in Sam.

“I gotta go.” He whispers because he understands that this isn’t right or perfect.

_No you don’t, you can stay._

“I know.”

*-*-*

“We deserve happiness.” Dean starts before Sam has a chance to complain at the unexpected phone call in the very, very, very early hours of the morning. His voice is a harsh whisper echoing around the bathroom, hidden from a sleeping Carmen. “We hunt and we kick evil’s ass, we deserve to be happy.”

“Dean? What the hell, dude, it’s three in the morning.”

“The witching hour,” He smirks and hears Sam’s confused  _what?_  On the other end of the line, “but you don’t...I mean, I know but...”

“Are you drunk?” It’s said in a much warmer tone than last time.

“I deserve to be happy, don’t I, Sammy?”

“Dean, what? Of course you do, of course you do.”

“Thanks, Sammy, I needed to...like, I know I’m not a saint or anything but I deserve... _something_ , right? For a little while?”

“Are you drunk?” Sam repeats the question, annunciating each word with more importance than the last. Dean swirls the beer inside the bottle, fingers on its neck turning it around and around.

“Night, Sam.”

“Dean—”

The line goes dead before he can face another goodbye.

*-*-*

There’s a crash downstairs as his family in this reality come barging into this place that’s supposed to be his home. They’re gonna try and stage another intervention, but this time he’s sure they’ll be a lot more forceful. Dean’s holed up in the bathroom again, but he’s not holding a phone, he’s holding a knife.

He’s sure it would have worked last time if he’d just been strong enough to let go and he knows it’ll work this time if he can manage to follow through.

_It’ll hurt, it’ll hurt like hell._

“Dean? Dean!” Sam screams through the apartment and he hears Carmen call too. His mother and Jess follow suit, and then he hears more. Mike from the garage, Natalie from the nursery store he popped in to. The family GP. They’re all in his ears, screaming at him to get out, to not do anything stupid. Patronising, condescending, suffocating.

Caring, loving, with his best interests at heart.

He hears Carmen’s voice through the door and she’s whispering that she can’t do this without him, their baby needs a father. He can feel himself being ensnared once more. Pulled away from his life and back into theirs.

He has to do it he has to do it he has to do it he has to do it. Do it do it do it  _do it!_

He plunges the dagger deep into his chest and his conscious was right.

It does hurt like hell.

*-*-*

Dean wakes up in his brother’s embrace. He shivers from the cold and he struggles to even keep his eyes open, let alone speak. He’s weak from blood loss and his wrists sting from being let loose. His shoulders ache like a bitch and Sam notices the shift straight away, the life in his brother’s gaze,  _recognition._

“Dean?”

The Djinn’s body is slumped against a wall, blade stuck straight through the heart and there are tear-tracks on Sam’s cheeks that guide fresh droplets to his already sodden collar.

“Dean? You with me?”

“My hero.”

Sam laughs as he helps Dean to his feet and keeps close until his older brother’s in the clear.

*-*-*

Sam keeps a wary eye on his brother at all times.

Dean blanches when he finds out he was gone less than a day and minutes after he’s comfortable in the back seat of the Impala the ambulance for the other victim arrives. Sam spins an intricate tale while Dean leans against the upholstery and drinks in being back. This Sam lies with the best of them. This is his Sam.

Sammy.

Days later, Dean’s flicking through the magazine in his hands, fingers subconsciously aware with each page turn of what is to follow.

But  _seeing_  it makes Dean’s fingers go numb and they barely keep hold of the glossy pages while Carmen smiles up at him. In his head he hears; _“We can have a future together, have our own family.”_ And _“I love you Dean, please.”_

He’s already told Sam the basics...and more, but he doesn’t want to _talk_  about it. None of that touchy-feely crap even if it would help him deal. Sam thinks about an entry he saw in his dad’s journal once. That Dean shut down after their mom died. Stayed quiet, while Sam just cried louder.

He looks away when Dean pockets a ripped out sheet of the magazine.

Later in the day, they’re turning into a diner-stop on the side of the highway and Dean’s still riding shotgun. His hands shake too much to take control of the wheel and even he knows his limits...most of the time.

He’s staring at the same page of the magazine he was staring at hours ago once they were packed and ready to cross another state-line.

Sam knows it has nothing to do with the beer on the clipping.

When they’re seated in a booth at the back; just how they like it, Dean slides the magazine sheet over. Sam looks at the page and then looks up at his brother.

“That’s Carmen. I don’t know if it’s her real name. I don’t see how it could be, but that’s her.”

“Carmen as in—”

“My fantasy girlfriend? Yeah,  _that_  Carmen.”

Dean never tells Sam that there was a baby on the way. He doesn’t want that kind of pity.

“She’s pretty.” Sam says softly, casting a wary glance in his brother’s direction. Dean’s eyes seem too wistful but there’s a smile playing on his lips.

“Yeah, I guess she is.” He clears his throat. “ _Was_.”

He leaves the folded up magazine ripping on the diner table as they leave. He tries not to look back, he tries, he fails, but he still walks away. He manages to do that much at least, and he tries not to hear the faint  _goodbye_  in his ears as he does so.

  
  


**_-Fin_ **

  
_._   
  


 


End file.
